1. Personal data (name, surname, rank, age, occupation, marital status):
Gunner Czesław Januszkiewicz, born in 1909, accountant, unmarried.
2. Date and circumstances of arrest:
On 20 June 1941 in Baranowicze, in my own flat, at around 2.00 a.m., during a search and seizure of some of the [illegible] and documents.
3. Name of the camp, prison, forced labor site:
Settlements of Tarucino [Tarutino] and Zatalovka [?], Krasnoyarsk Krai.
4. Description of a camp, prison:
A small settlement by a railway station. Flat terrain, a workers’ barrack: dirty, leaky, infested with bedbugs.
5. Compositions of prisoners, POWs, exiles:
There were Poles, Byelorussians, and Jews. Among us were attorneys, teachers, clerks, laborers, and children – small and school-age. Intellectual and moral standing varied, mutual relations were usually friendly, [illegible] towards strangers.
6. Life in the camp, prison:
Early wake-up call: at 8.00 a.m., all people capable of work had to show up in the taiga 15 kilometers away from the living place (to be covered on foot). Quota to attain: 5–8 cubic meters (logging, sawing, and chopping). Remuneration: 2 rubles and 8 kopecks per cubic meter. Muddy taiga, with masses of mosquitoes and other insects; no protection was supplied. Own clothing or supplied padded jacket. Food rations: 400–800 grams of bread (only for the working people). Short Soviet lectures.
7. Attitude of the local NKVD towards the Poles:
The attitude was seemingly neutral, but everybody was followed, spied on, and provoked.
Propaganda was being spread at every opportunity. Punishments were meted out in the
form of decreasing bread rations. There was false information given out about Poland.
8. Medical assistance, hospitals, mortality:
There was no medical assistance on site – a clinic was in a city 20 kilometers away, as well as a hospital. There were no deaths in my area.
9. Was there any possibility to communicate with one’s country and family?
We weren’t allowed to contact the country; part of my family was with me.
10. When were you released and how did you manage to join the army?
I was released on 1 September 1941 in the settlement of Tarucino [Tarutino], from where I moved to the city of Achinsk. Having found out that a new division was being formed in the southern USSR districts, I set out along with my family to Jambyl [Taraz], and then traveled to Lugovoy, where I appeared before the drafting commission and was accepted into the Polish army on 15 March 1942.